Life

Lhote was born in Bordeaux and learnt wood carving
and sculpture from the age of 12, when his father apprenticed him to a
local furniture maker to be trained as a sculptor in wood. He enrolled
at the École des Beaux-Arts
in Bordeaux in 1898 and studied decorative sculpture until 1904. Whilst
there, he began to paint in his spare time and he left home in 1905,
moving into his own studio to devote himself to painting. He was
influenced by Gauguin and Cézanne and held his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Druet in 1910, four years after he had moved to Paris.
After initially working in a Fauvist style, Lhote shifted towards Cubism and joined the Section d'Or group in 1912, exhibiting at the Salon de la Section d'Or. He was alongside some of the fathers of modern art, including Gleizes, Villon, Duchamp, Metzinger, Picabia and La Fresnaye.
The outbreak of the First World War interrupted his work and, after discharge from the army in 1917, he became one of the group of Cubists supported by Léonce Rosenberg. In 1918, he co-founded Nouvelle Revue Française,
the art journal to which he contributed articles on art theory until
1940. Lhote taught at the Académie Notre-Dame des Champs from 1918 to
1920 and later taught at other Paris art schools—including his own
school, which he founded in Montparnasse in 1922.
Lhote lectured extensively in France and abroad, including Belgium, England, Italy and, from the 1950s, also in Egypt and Brazil. His work was awarded with the Grand Prix National de Peinture in 1955, and the UNESCO
commission for sculpture appointed Lhote president of the International
Association of Painters, Engravers and Sculptors. Lhote died in Paris
in 1962.

Contents

Lives and work

The brothers were born in or near Laon
in northern France. Mathieu was born in 1607; Antoine and Louis were
originally believed to have been born in 1588 and 1593, respectively,
but are now thought to have been born later; the National Gallery gives them birth dates of "c. 1600? and c. 1603?". By 1630, all three lived in Paris, where they shared the studio founded by Antoine, who was admitted to the Paris painters' guild,
enabling his two brothers to train under him without paying fees.
Within a few years they were receiving important commissions, Antoine
painting a group portrait of the aldermen of Paris in 1632. In 1648 the three brothers were received into the Académie de peinture et de sculpture on the year of its founding.[2]
Because of the remarkable similarity of their styles of painting and
the difficulty of distinguishing works by each brother (they signed
their paintings only with their surname, and many may have been collaborations), they are commonly referred to as a single entity, Le Nain. Louis is usually credited with the best-known of their paintings, a series of scenes depicting peasant life; he may have visited Italy, and been influenced by the Dutch artist Pieter van Laer, who was based in Rome but also passed through France in the mid-1620s.[3]
These genre paintings are often noted for being remarkably literal, yet
sympathetic; the subjects are never grotesque or seem ridiculed. There
remains some question, however, as to whether some of the assumed
“peasants” were truly from the rural class—many seem to be simply the
bourgeois at leisure in the country. Their sober execution and choice of
colour recall characteristics of the Spanish school. Their choice of
subject was unusual for the time: the world of Paris was busy with
mythological allegories, and the “heroic deeds” of the king, while the
three Le Nain devoted themselves chiefly to these subjects of humble
life such as “Boys Playing Cards,” “The Forge,” or “The Peasants' Meal,”
three pictures now in the Louvre. Their Adoration of the Shepherds in London (National Gallery) is an exception, and many other civic and church works may have been lost in the French Revolution.
The brothers also produced miniatures (mainly attributed to Antoine) and portraits (attributed to Mathieu). Mathieu became the official painter (Peintre Ordinaire) of Paris in 1633, and much later was made a chevalier. Among his sitters for portraits were Marie de Medicis and Cardinal Mazarin, but these works seem to have disappeared.
Antoine and Louis died in 1648. Mathieu lived until 1677, and appears
to have painted until the mid-1650s, although no works are signed after
1648. In 1662 he received the unusual honour for a painter of the Order of Saint Michael, but was expelled a year later, and imprisoned in 1662 for wearing the collar of the order when he was not entitled to it.[4]
The Le Nain paintings had a revival in the 1840s and, thanks to the exertions of Champfleury, made their appearance on the walls of the Louvre in 1848. Champfleury was a friend of the Realist painter Gustave Courbet,
and a theorist of Realism and writer on French popular arts. The
“naive” quality of these works, with their static poses, “awkward”
compositions and peasant subjects were admired and may well have
exercised some influence on many nineteenth-century artists, notably
Courbet himself. They have remained popular through the 20th century.